Re: Fantasic Four Reboot
I had nothing against Chiklis as the Thing, I just didn't think his look was good at all. You guys have said that enough. I thought Chris Evans was great as Johnny, but Jessica Alba as Susan Storm was the worst casting of all.
Kate Bosworth is Sue Storm come to life, and a good enough actress as she proved as Lois Lane in
Superman Returns (2006). I have read she was even up for the part, but didn't get it.
Maybe that was part of Tim Story's apparent drive to make the FF blacker, with Kerry Washington as Alicia Masters, and an FF soundtrack CD (which I have, yes I'm that fanatically pro-FF) that's African American in musical style too.
Miscast as Jessica Alba was, she was better than Ioan Gruffudd as Mister Fantastic. No speculative race agenda there either, just bad, bad, lame, very much no good acting.
But bad as he was, director Tim Story was the worst. Nothing could be as bad as that, when you take into account all the wrong decisions ranging from Dr. Doom dressing like a tramp in the first movie to the crass Dodge product placement on the Fantasticar in the second movie.
And by "nothing could be worse" I mean except for the original score, which does nothing with the four elements, or the characters, including Dr. Doom who doesn't get his own theme or even a cue, or anything. It's just "here-comes- the-five-notes, and here-comes- the-five-notes, and here-comes- the-five-notes, and once-more-the-five-notes, and yet-more-the-five-notes, the-boring-old-five-notes, the-boring-old-five-notes..." repeating like a bad Saturday morning cartoon "theme".
Here's what I want.
Annihilus. And the N-Zone. I would quite like it to be Sunshine, except that instead of turning pathetic and like a weak echo of
Event Horizon when Pinbacker shows up, if turns fantastic and awesome when we get an authentic big villain with an alternate reality that
rocks.
Anyone who wants to direct this has to audition by making a five minute short, and if by about three minutes in there are no jaws dropping and nobody is looking freaked out, you are not the director for the FANTASTIC Four.
I think the right model for this is not Iron Man but the way Louis Leterrier did
The Incredible Hulk: a great opening sequence to explain everything to newcomers and rush us into the action, and from then one jaw-droppingly cool thing we've never seen before after another. Here's this amazing favela, here's this completely out-there bottling plant, here's what may be the hottest girl in the world who you've never seen before, here's Rickson Gracie teaching our hero - it never stops. If five minutes go by and you were not wowed by something, the director is not doing it right.
How you justify this is not a problem that interest me much. A girl who looks like that can't get a job except in an unsafe bottling plant? Fine, just bring her on, and then something else amazing and then something else.
If you can make it smart and fantastic too, like
Inception, that's a bonus. But the FANTASTIC is on the box, and it has to be in the box. I want at least 2 hours of WOW! in a 90-minute bag, straining every seam with the pressure of industrial-strength concentrated
WOW!
And for music I want Craig Armstrong, or someone equally able and willing to get into it and take this up to 10.
Oh, and for ethnic agendas, there should only be three. Reed, Sue and Johnny should be pure whitebread WASP. Ben should be clearly Jewish. And great effort should be made to show that the alien, exotic culture of the foe actually is a complete and completely alien culture that we're only getting to see part of in this movie.
That's one area where thinking time will be rewarded, because it makes the FANTASTIC real by reassuring us that a trip into the villain's head is a trip into a whole 'nother universe. The villain can't be just some mundane person with a rubber suit.